Can you predict the future? Is what your writing about popular? Does it have an audience or will it have an audience? Can you predict what will be electric and hotly searched for on the Internet? If you possess Paul Atreides’ prescience ability, you are already a millionaire, if not, you must use what mental ability you have: intuition and empirical data. Predicting what will be searched for heavily over the Internet in the film or TV industry is not easy nor is distinction with said content because of two factors: 1.) there is more content than you can possibly sift through and 2.) there are more competitors in your field than you are even aware of vying for the exact same search engine traffic you are.
I made one prediction more than eight months ago and two days ago it paid off big time.
Here’s what happened and how I went from 4000 Page Views to over 16,000 in a single day.
I became aware of and posted the television trailer for The Phantom (2010) on November 5, 2009. I decided to post this television trailer on one of my websites because I knew The Phantom had a long history across comic books, television, and film and therefore had a large fan base. I labeled it: The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer with the year it would air in the U.S. as one of its title tags because of the wealth of other Phantom movies and television shows out there. That post started getting 4o to 50 page views a day after having been posted for some time. I was later able to view a copy of The Phantom (2010), a two part mini-series, months before it aired in the U.S. After I watched the mini-series, I sat down and wrote two TV reviews for it, one review for the first half titled TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 1 and one for the second, TV Review: The Phantom (2010): Part 2. This seemed appropriate since the mini-series was in two parts. I also did this because if there was a lot of search engine traffic for The Phantom (2010), having two reviews posted would potentially mean double the search engine traffic for relevant searches.
As the air date for The Phantom (2010) started approaching (Sunday, June 20, 2010 @ 9PM EST), the daily page views for its television trailer I had posted began going up. On the Sunday of its premiere on the SyFy Channel, the trailer received nearly 600 page views. That was not the great part. The great part was that people were beginning to search for reviews of the new mini-series as well.
My Phantom reviews had languished with very few page views up to that point. Since my reviews were the only ones, or nearly the only ones, posted online, I got and continue to get a lot search engine traffic because of them. If you don’t believe me, type The Phantom 2010 Review into Google right now and see which website shows up first in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Bittorrent sites – the ones that post trailers and reviews with their torrent posts – also were linking to my trailer and my reviews. Forums began linking to the trailer and reviews as well. In a word, my three The Phantom (2010) posts had gone viral.
And you know what, I was almost ready for the traffic onslaught. I had the WordPress Related Posts plugin installed (I talked about that here) so site visitors could find other relevant The Phantom (2010) articles. I also went one step further and edited the bottom of the trailer post with the direct links to the two reviews (just in case, right above the trailer box itself). I hyperlinked the actors names in the posts to their tags on the site. I also linked to Phantom products on Amazon within the trailer post, as I talked about previous incarnation of the character in media available for purchase on that site. I had Google Adsense ads and other affiliate ads flanking my Phantom posts top, right (sidebar profit), and bottom.
I had typed in as many tag combination as I could think of that someone would type into a search engine to find The Phantom (2010) Television Trailer or reviews for the mini-series. Turns out I was right. Many of those tags were used by people in their searches. Remember when we spoke about proper keywords tags, their importance, and hammering search engine terms?
I had switched website host to a provider that could held a spike in traffic and deal with it efficiently without any down time (HostGator), unlike Bluefur and HostICan. I spoke about both of those hosts in these two posts here and here.
I had Google Analytics and the WordPress.com Stats plugin (discussed here, pictured in this post) installed so I could accurately chart the traffic.
I also dropped a few links here and there on appropriate posts on other people’s websites letting them and their site visitors know that I had The Phantom (2010) reviews and its trailer available for viewing.
Here is where I wasn’t ready for the increased traffic: my Email Subscription option. It was giving me trouble and people could not sign up. They began emailing me to ask for the link to sign up for Email Subscriptions. I was more than happy to comply but how many people got frustrated and didn’t even email me? This traffic deluge served to illuminate a hole in my subscription methodology. It also showed that I had been losing potential subscribers for some time. Do not ever let this happen to you. Check your subscription options, all of them. Make sure they are all functioning properly. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity – Seneca
Because of this spike in traffic, which increased, Sunday to Monday to Tuesday (June 22, 2010), home page hits for the site increased by a factor of four. I was already posting two to three times a day (the 5-11-4 Rule) on the site but now I made sure to post popular, mainstream items instead of art house or lesser known items that I might have. This traffic will not last forever so quickly cultivating new fans is crucial.
Conclusion
This traffic has been a great ride but it will eventually tapper off and end but there will also be residuals if properly leveraged: new subscribers via Email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter and more regulars visitors to the home page.
What do you think about this traffic spike? Are you prepared for your own? Having you ever accurately prophesied a film or TV topic in the form of a post that brought in a ton of traffic? Please share below. In any case, I have the concluding parts of the Movie Website In-Text Advertising series coming soon as well as Amazon Associate tips. Subscribe here so you don’t miss out.
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